Getting Around a Wide-Angle Lens

Going on holiday is fun, but it's also a time of concessions on several levels. Especially if you can't bring every lens you own or (in theory) might need. Since the awesome Nikon 5-500mm f/1.8G VR ED N (small, <€1000, <1kg) isn't widely available. This means deciding what to bring in your camera bag.

In my case, I wanted to experiment with primes during my holiday. this also means that you have to use the foot-zoom, and on several occasions that won't work because of certain limitation (walls, buildings, ravines, etc.). In those cases you have 3 options;

1. Don't make the photo
2. Make a photo, but know immediately that it will end in /dev/null when you get home (a just-for-the-record photo).
3. Improvise

So as you might have guessed, I ran into such a situation in Toledo, Spain. They have this great cathedral in the middle of an old town with narrow streets. You need a ultra-wide angle lens for almost anything there.
On that day, I had my 35, 50 and 85mm lenses with me, and in that situation I might have taken a photo of a part of the door, but I wanted the entire cathedral.... That's was a challenge.

The solution to this problem is panorama related. Just make enough photos of the cathedral and use panorama software to stitch those together. The result is a (near) Gigapixel image (way to big for normal processing) with a cathedral on it. Just resize the photo for portability.

The following photo consists of 72 photos taken in about 2 minutes time without a tripod (there was enough light). You can see the full image in the panorama section of my website.

1 cathedral stitched from 72 photos

During the postprocessing I found out the following:

• It took 3.5 hours of rendering time for AutoPano to create this image.
• Adobe photoshop had trouble saving it after cropping (there was a 2GB limit on photoshop file size)....
• Adobe Lightroom doesn't like these formats very much.
• My iMac is slow.

Anyway, the exercise was completed. I end-up with a photo of the entire Cathedral in Toledo. Taken with a 35mm lens (72 times), where a 10mm wide-angle would have done it in 1 or 2 shots.

This proves that you don't need to cover 1mm-1000mm in your lens bag. Just make sure that you have enough memory-cards with you.

Comments

[Alejandro]

"Since the awesome Nikon 5-500mm f/1.8G VR ED N (small, <€1000, <1kg) isn't widely available." boy, you have made me laugh!